As an AmeriCorps VISTA member, I work on projects designed to increase the capacity of attorneys and advocates who provide disaster legal assistance. Thus, with few exceptions, I work more with attorneys and advocates than with the disaster victims themselves. On the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service organized by the Corporation for National and Community Service, however, I had the opportunity to join fellow VISTA members in doing community service. So, instead of spending this past Monday in the office, I joined VISTAs from the Health & Welfare Council of Long Island and volunteers from All Hands Volunteers to work in a residential basement damaged by Superstorm Sandy. The experience led me to reconsider my preconceived notion of the relationship between direct and indirect service.

The VISTA and All Hands volunteers took time during their lunch break to pose for a photo. Courtesy of the Long Island Volunteer Center.

Prior to Superstorm Sandy, the homeowner’s son ran a personal training business out of the basement. Submerged under 6 feet of water, the basement and all of the gym equipment were completely destroyed. While a contractor initially replaced the walls, they quickly became re-infested with mold. All Hands Volunteers offered to rebuild the basement, with their corps of full-time volunteers and day-to-day participants like me.

While I admittedly had zero building and construction experience (save for assembly of the Ikea variety), the All Hands site supervisor made sure to assign tasks we could complete, provide ample instruction and supervision, and pair us to make the work social and collaborative. The day’s work consisted of preparing, installing, and securing drywall and cement backer boards, which are the foundation of home interior walls. Volunteers were broken into teams that prepared, installed, and secured the wall materials.

My partner Charnelle and I spent the day inspecting and fastening the studs that keep cement backer board solidified and in place. Cement board is a water and mold resistant alternative to drywall. With both drywall and cement backer board, the screws keeping the boards in place have to be depressed below the surface before finishing and paint can be applied. So, Charnelle and I went around the basement armed with power drills, triangles, a T-square and pencils, checking every single screw on each installed piece of cement backer board. Other than a hand cramp from continual use of the power drill, I came away unscathed, albeit still without much construction skill.

An All Hands volunteer at work. Courtesy of the Long Island Volunteer Center.

Over the course of the day, I had the opportunity to converse with the All Hands volunteers and learn about their direct service. I left the house having made a tangible impact in a Sandy victim’s recovery – the cement backer boards I helped install will be the foundation of the finished basement walls. While it is sometimes difficult to leave the office and easily conjure the faces of people who benefit from the resources I am developing, I came away from my day of service having met someone who I definitively helped. To say the work was rewarding and of the utmost importance would be an understatement.

Direct service produced clear and palpable results that made it easy to see the impact my work had on Sandy victims, especially with the homeowner watching. It felt great to personally assist a Sandy victim. Still, I came away from my day of service feeling just as strongly about the importance of my VISTA service as I did on my first day. I had an enhanced appreciation of how vital both my efforts and those of the All Hands volunteers are to New York’s Sandy recovery.

I had assumed that direct services and capacity-building services were the front and back office of a giant non-profit machine; I now understand that the relationship isn’t so simple. We perform fundamentally different, yet equally important roles.

The All Hands volunteers help victims literally rebuild their lives after a disaster, and as a VISTA I can help make that rebuilding as easy and rapid as possible. For example, as I was working on the basement, I thought: “Why did mold return so quickly after a contractor initially reconstructed the walls? Was the contractor licensed? Did the homeowner have the necessary legal advice and knowledge to make the right rebuilding, insurance, and aid application decisions?” At Pro Bono Net, I am helping create resources that address these very questions and facilitate the provision of legal services to disaster victims.

Thanks to my participation in the MLK Day of Service, I now realize that there isn’t a yin-and-yang relationship between direct service and capacity building. All Hands Volunteers and Pro Bono Net don’t interact with each other or have the same deliverables, clients, or perspectives, but are both broadly engaged in disaster recovery. Each organization’s unique means of helping disaster victims are equally important and indicative of varied skills, backgrounds, and responses to different victim needs more so than a desire to be the front office or back office on recovery efforts. In our different ways and in our fundamentally different offices, we are serving the countless victims struggling to rebuild over a year after Superstorm Sandy.

 

Patrick Reynolds, the 2013 Pro Bono Net and Montana Legal Services Association 2013 AmeriCorps VISTA, reports on the December 4th, 2013 LSNTAP webinar on the use of technology to help unrepresented litigants. More of Patrick’s posts are available here.

The last LSNTAP webinar of 2013 – the Beyond Online Intake on Wednesday, December 4th -highlighted a number of projects relating to Triage and Expert Systems. The goal of the webinar was to provide a look into programs that increase the efficiency of intake, as well as the applications and tools that can be combined with them in order to improve the services offered. The webinar was moderated by Mirenda Watkins of Pro Bono Net, while projects were presented by Mike Grunenwald of the DC Bar Pro Bono Program, Gwen Daniels from Illinois Legal Aid Online, Gordon Shaw of the Massachusetts Justice Project, and Liz Keith for Pro Bono Net.

The slides can be viewed along with a recording of the webinar on the SWEB support site. A recording of the webinar has also been posted to the LSNTAP YouTube page.

Mirenda Watkins began the webinar by offering a proposed definition of triage and online intake. Triage was defined as a rational distribution of  resources based on litigant need and case complexity to insure that all litigants have access to justice. The triage process sorts resources and people to reach the most fair and just result for all involved. Intake was defined as the process of deciding which clients will be accepted by a legal services provider based on articulated criteria. Intake can include data collection, review, denial of services, and referrals and can be done online, in person, and over the phone.

Mike Grunenwald, Senior Project Specialist, DC Bar Pro Bono Program
Consumer Debt/Bankruptcy App.

Mike Grunenwald gave the first presentation on the topic of two Apps in development by the DC Bar Pro Bono Program through partnerships with Georgetown Law and Neota Logic. The first app presented was the Consumer Debt/Bankruptcy App. Utilizing law students with tech support from Neota Logic, the app is intended to assist consumers in generating no contact letters to creditors, but has been expanded to help determine if a person was judgment proof. Seeing the potential for expansion and with the willingness of the Georgetown law students to contribute to further development, the scope of the app has been expanded again and connected into the DC Bar Pro Bono Programs bankruptcy clinic. This expansion became a tool for bankruptcy clinic pre-screening that could quickly run users through a bankruptcy checklist that previously took around 30 minutes to complete during the traditional bankruptcy clinic.

The app should save a great deal of time at the bankruptcy clinic stage and allow the clinics to operate with increased efficiency. While the DC Bar Pro Bono Project is not currently doing online intake, the usefulness of this app for increasing the efficiency of their bankruptcy clinic will hopefully serve as a driver for online intake.
Concierge App

Another effort by the DC Bar Pro Bono Project is to develop a Concierge App. The goal of this app is to devise a better way to help people find the resources they are looking for. The Concierge App will ask visitors to the site why they are there and  would then help them find exactly what they are looking for. This program would also make connections where the user might not see them. The example given was that issues with Divorce, Domestic Violence, and Housing Rights are sometimes intertwined, and the process helps to branch out and identify other relevant resources for complicated individual situations.

Gordon Shaw, Executive Director, Massachusetts Justice Project
Legal Resource Finder

Gordon Shaw discussed the Legal Resource Finder, a project funded by a 2012 Technology Initiative Grant (TIG). The tool will create an expert web based triage tool to help the applicant figure out where they can get help. This is needed because of the flood of requests for assistance and the inability of the existing systems to handle the volume. In Massachusetts, there are 18 specific legal aid programs that lack any centralized way to direct people to their resources.

The site will be up and running shortly and is built with the Drupal data management system. This program uses short online forms where users fill out a limited number of questions about their issues and their demographics. The Legal Resource finder will then search a database and inform them about which programs in their area are accepting those issues for intake, provide live links to online resources, and direct them to additional programs that may exist to help. The Legal Resource finder will be part of one of the state legal aid websites, and other legal aid programs will be linking to the site if they have an online intake system. While this site is not intake in and of itself, and the information will not be saved, it will help steer away people who are clearly over income for example towards more productive areas than online intake.

Gwen Daniels, Director of Technology Development, Illinois Legal Aid Online
Online intake, Triage and Expert Systems

Gwen Daniels presented the Illinois statewide online access system, a TIG funded project from January 2012 that is currently in live beta. This project handles problematic codes where the triage is less visible and directs the user away from programs and into self help material. One problem this program was intended to combat is that telephone intake operators spend half their time informing applicants they can’t help them. This system was built with the idea of pushing high priority cases towards intake while directing the rest to self help resources. The system has an Admin focused interface on Illinoislegaladvocate.org which allows each organization or sometimes each office to set system messages at a problem code level. Advocates can open and close intake, and set limits for income, assets, zip codes and counties, and the number of intakes allowed.

The user interface for both intake and triage is on the statewide public website platform. From the user perspective, if legal aid is available then a yellow popup will inform them of their options. For example, visitors with food stamp related issues such as “I tried to apply for food stamps but they wouldn’t let me” would be directed not to online intake but to an exit screen with links to more relevant content. Selecting the right options will transfer them into the legal server, while filtering out the cases that can’t be helped. It also allows for an “Always Divert” option, where terms like “Traffic” or “criminal”, which LAS doesn’t take will be directed to call other agencies. This program will be out of beta in 2014, with next steps being focused on deeper integration with systems, true statewide integration, and analysis dating to refine triage rules.

Another project is a statewide collaborative data system, funded by a 2013 TIG grant, which will allow for a statewide legal server to be used to hold online intake. This project will be able to pass data from the case management system of each organization and the statewide websites into a single legal server. The resulting data can then be analyzed to see how well they are picking up cases that are the best use of their limited resources. This should allow them to spot patterns in the cases that get picked up and further refine their triage rules to avoid intake for people who are ineligible.

Liz Keith, LawHelp Program Manager, Pro Bono Net
New Mexico Legal Aid 2014 Triage Pilot Program

As part of a 2014 Technology Initiative Grant, Pro Bono Net is partnering with New Mexico Legal Aid and Neota Logic to develop a statewide triage system that intelligently guides users towards the most actionable results and ensures New Mexico Legal Aid and its partners get cases that will allow them to do the most good. New Mexico has large rural areas that cover thousands of square miles where increased access to resources is necessary. This program has several components, encompassing triage for advocates, triage for individuals in need of legal assistance, development of new self-help and legal education content for triage system users, and a data reporting service.

While it is piloted in New Mexico the longer-term goal is to make it available nationwide. Keeping an eye toward the creation and hosting of such a program in other states, there will be a set of canned or master rules that can be modified for other states. The advocates triage program gathers information on litigants based on program priorities, intake requirements, and broader advocacy strategies in order to determine what resources or referrals would be most impactful. The first step for such a program is developing an agreed upon system of questions and protocol to help script and guide triage and referral rules for the system. The triage interview for advocates will then be adapted to create a similar tool for the public. Public interviews will be provided in English and Spanish with the goal to provide a one stop universal tool that can be used statewide for diagnosing and guiding people to the relevant resources, forms, referrals, or intake. Those directed to intake will be provided with preparatory information, and recommended actions to help the user prepare for their appointment or meeting with an advocate. It will also include the option to email a standard email request to a recommended organization for reviewing and uploading into their CMS where appropriate. The interview template with Neota Logic could also be widgitized for inclusion in other systems such as those of public libraries.

This year’s Technology Initiative Grant’s annual conference is slated for next week, January 15th through the 17th in Jacksonville, Florida.  This is the only national conference to focus specifically on technology in nonprofit legal service environments.  This year’s conference highlights online intake and triage, support for self-represented litigants as well as data analysis and visualization. Pro Bono Net’s Executive Director, Mark O’Brien, LawHelp Program Manager Liz Keith, LawHelp Interactive Program Manager Claudia Johnson, LawHelp Interactive Coordinator Mirenda Watkins,  LawHelp Program Associate Jillian Theil and LawHelp Program Coordinator Xander Karsten are slated to participate in a variety of panels this year. Pro Bono Net’s Director of Technology and Operations, Doug Carlson, will also be in attendance.

Mark O’Brien and Mirenda Watkins will join Marc Lauritsen of Capstone Practice Systems, Mike WIlliams, Chief Clerk at the New York Bronx County Family Court as well as Vince Morris and Kim Marshall at Arkansas Legal Services Partnership on a panel exploring the history and future of LHI in “LHI- You’ve come a long way baby.”

Mirenda, Liz Keith and Mike Williams will sit down with Susan Ledray of Minnesota’s Fourth Judicial District to explore both physical and online best practices when creating services for self-represented litigants in “Creating On-Ramps to Online Resources: User Centered Design for Self Help Environments.”

Liz will also speak about trends in online intake and triage with Illinois Legal Aid Online’s Gwen Daniels and Northwest Justice Project’s Joan Kleinberg in “Online Triage and Intake: To Infinity and Beyond.”

Claudia Johnson will join Caroline Robinson of Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, Jeff Hogue of Legal Assistance of Western New York as well as Gwen Daniels and Dennis Rios of Illinois Legal Aid Online in “LEP Dreaming of the Future,” a panel focusing on harnessing technology to address the needs of LEP communities.

Xander Karsten will join LawNY’s Anna Hineline and Legal Server’s Ivy Ashton in “Introduction to Data Visualization and Process Analysis.”

Finally, Claudia, Liz and Jillian will be hosting Affinity Group gatherings covering LawHelp Interactive, LiveHelp and social media.

We also hope to see many of our partners and stakeholders at the conference, in panels, and at our LawHelp Networking Session: What’s New, What’s Next in 2014, on Friday from 8:30-9:30 AM.  Not only is the session a great opportunity to meet other admins from around the country and see what will be changing in the next year, we will also hear from Sue Encherman, the Director of Administration at Northwest Justice Project and Barbara Siegel, Project Manager at Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association, about exciting work taking place on LawHelp.org and probono.net projects in Washington and Massachusetts.

Directly preceding the conference itself, Claudia Johnson and Mirenda Watkins will be hosting an in-person training for the LawHelp Interactive community on creating online forms and managing interactive forms projects.

To learn more about this year’s conference and many other sessions of interest to the legal services technology community, visit the TIG website.

I will be the first to admit it, I am a Facebook junkie.  It’s my New Year’s resolution to break the habit, but in the mean time I am inundated with the typical end-of-the-year “list projects” in my news feed.  This year, it is the “Top 10 books that have stayed with you”.  So when faced with sitting down to do a “Year in Review” of the Connecting Justice Communities Blog, I’m taking a page from Facebook, and reflecting on the blogs that will stay with me and why:

This is by no means a complete list, (for a full list you’d have to read all the series in our blog!) but it’s a place to start. By just sitting down to write this I am more excited than ever to see what next year holds!

On December 16, the Practising Law Institute (PLI) presented a program on “Ethical Issues in Pro Bono Representation”, featuring a star-stacked panel of legal services attorneys, pro bono coordinators, area experts, and more. The group discussed a variety of issues in pro bono, ranging from client identification and confidentiality to spotting and resolving conflicts.

The panelists discussed the difficulties inherent to many pro bono cases such as ensuring that unsophisticated clients understand exactly what the representation

Jennifer Kroman
Jennifer Kroman

entails and sometimes more importantly does not entail. They suggested a best practice of detailing relationships in writing, and reviewing documents line-by-line to guarantee that clients know the scope of the arrangement.

Douglas Chu, a partner at Hynes & Chu LLP, discussed client identification concerns, focusing specifically on Elder Law. Mr. Chu stressed the question “who is the room?” and the importance of speaking to potential clients one-on-one. In Elder Law, there are often parties with competing interests, but also clients who may want, and in some circumstances need, input from those parties. To deal with these potential difficulties, Mr. Chu recommended formally codifying the attorney-client relationship (once again, the importance of detailing arrangements in writing) and dealing with clients’ associates firmly but gently to preserve good relations in case their help is needed later.

After the program, I sat down for a brief chat about pro bono with three of the panelists:

  • Jennifer Kroman, Director of Pro Bono Practice at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton
  • Program chair Louis Sartori, Director of the Pro Bono Practice at The Legal Aid Society
  • Michael Scherz, Director of the Domestic Violence Project at Lawyers for Children.
Lou Sartori
Lou Sartori

Lou and Jennifer agreed with the panel’s focus on the intertwining issues of client identification and confidentiality. One of the greatest challenges in pro bono is finding the balance between a lawyer’s duty of candor to the tribunal and the duty to attorney-client privilege. Jennifer commented that confidentiality is the “linchpin of a successful attorney-client relationship” and that knowing when and how to break it is one of the biggest issues in pro bono, especially because clients are often unfamiliar with the limits of privilege.

Reflecting on recent changes in pro bono, Jennifer highlighted Cleary’s internal pro bono wiki as an example of how firms can utilize technology to ease attorneys into pro bono work and widen their potential reach. Similarly, Lou said that technological innovations are allowing providers to find, train, and organize volunteers more effectively than ever before.

The Internet has revolutionized outreach, giving pro bono professionals the tools to provide potential volunteers with convenient and practical trainings (for

example, webinars that provide attorneys with CLE) and ease them into pro bono work through programs such as clinical hotlines. Michael commented that many pro bono opportunities involving vulnerable populations such as children often sell themselves to volunteers. The key is to make lawyers aware of opportunities.

Michael Scherz
Michael Scherz

At Cleary, Jennifer uses attorneys’ interests in their paying area to place them in pro bono projects that they will find fulfilling; for example attorneys in their Latin American practice work to help Spanish-speaking women obtain U-Visas.

Despite the advances in outreach, training, and service provision, the three panelists agreed that the two most important elements of pro bono outreach are the same as they have always been: 1) make sure that attorneys are having fun, and 2) once someone has volunteered once, they become exponentially more likely volunteer again. As Lou put it, they become recidivist volunteers!

Although this was not my first time attending NLADA, one aspect of this year’s discussions hit me harder than it had in years past.  While it could be the session I attended, it seemed that amongst the many innovative workshops a growing number focused on data and statistics.  Not just why agencies must collect data, which seems to be moving from the focus of discussion to a premise, but into more complex ways of collecting, using and visualizing data. The following are just a few of my personal take-aways from this year’s conference:

 I am generally math-phobic… and I should probably get over that.

I am definitely one of those people on whom statistics is lost. Friends have joked that the reason I became a lawyer is that there is no math on the LSAT.  But having a working knowledge of types and quality of data and more information on reporting not only makes reading and understanding statistical data easier, but allows for a more thoughtful and reflective experience.  Ken Perri, Executive Director at Legal Assistance of Western New York, Jeff Hogue, Supervising Attorney at LawNY, and Bonnie Hough, managing attorney  at the California Administrative Office of the Court, Center for Families , Children and the Courts distilled many of these concepts incredibly well, and their materials are currently available from the session: “The Difference We Make”.

Gathering Data: Not just for reporting.  

With more and more of an emphasis on collecting data collaboratively, two of the early sessions focused on LSC’s project aimed at data collection and utilization.  In the session “Using Data to Improve the Delivery of Legal Services” James Sandman, President of the Legal Services Corporation, and two outside consultants – Dr. Sanjeev Khagram of Innovations for Scaling Impact and David Donbright of Keystone Accountability, described the findings of a survey they conducted regarding how legal services collects and utilized data, as well as next steps for the project.  The information presented can be found on LSC’s website. This was also reviewed in a second session “Relying on Data: New Initiatives to Increase Access to Justice”.

 Also of focus in the latter session, Chuck Greenfield, Chief Counsel, Civil Programs at NLADA showed NLADA’s own Civil Legal Aid Search site.  This provides information on studies that have been done and that are currently in progress to quantify issues impacting civil legal services and that can be used to think through new and different studies we would like to see in this arena. In addition, it looked back on statistics results and methodologies of past studies.

Once you’ve collected it… Data Visualization!

One interesting addition to the legal services data visualization world is a forthcoming site designed to visually capture a national justice index. In the same session, “Relying on Data: New Initiatives to Increase Access to Justice” David Udell and James Gamble from the National Center for Access to Justice and the Access to Justice Index Project previewed this site, which measures access to justice on several axis, and makes sense of the data in a geographically based interactive ways.  Check out the Access to Justice Index page at the National Center for Access to Justice at Cardozo Law School.

 Los Angeles Central Library is incredibly beautiful

This has nothing to do with data, but if you ever get a chance to check out the LA Public Library at 630 West 5th Street, it is an incredibly beautiful public library space. If you’re just visiting the city, it’s worth a special trip to see, and if you live in LA –  consider yourself lucky! In addition, the LA Law Library, just up the street, has a really robust partnership with the legal services community, and was one of the featured programs in the Libraries and Access to Justice webinar series.

 All in all, a really amazing conference in a beautiful city- can’t wait for next year in Arlington Virginia, to see where the data-driven discussion goes next!

Peter Markowitz, Judge Robert Katzmann, and Angela Fernandez

On November 20th, Talking Transition hosted “Accessing Justice for New York Immigrants,” a panel discussion on assisting immigrants facing deportation. Robert A. Katzmann, Chief Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and Angela Fernandez, Executive Director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, spoke about two new initiatives developed in response to the findings of Katzmann’s Study Group on Immigration Representation. Before turning to the
individual programs, the panel’s moderator, Professor Peter L. Markowitz, of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo School of Law, opened the discussion with a few striking figures:

  • 1.4 million immigrants live in New York City, representing 20% of the City’s population
  • Over 500,000 NYC non-citizens and their children live in poverty
  • 3,500 people annually face deportation without counsel and 50% of lawyers in NYC Immigration Courts have been found to be inadequate
  • A detained immigrant with legal representation is 11 times more likely to win his or her case

Immigrant Justice Corps

Judge Katzmann introduced the Immigrant Justice Corps, a new fellowship program seeking to “prevent deportation and put immigrants on a pathway to citizenship.” The Corps will launch in 2014, with an annual deployment of 25 recent law school graduates and 15 college graduates and will also include senior lawyers stationed across the nation. The three-year law fellows will be coupled with senior attorneys to provide an array of direct legal services to indigent immigrants while the two-year college graduate program will train fellows to serve as community advocates and paralegals in legal services and community-based organizations. Judge Katzmann hopes for the Corps to have an ultimate capacity of 15,000 cases.

New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP)

Upon allotting $500,000 to the one-year NYIFUP pilot program, New York City “became the first jurisdiction in the nation with a public defender system for immigrants.” The Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defenders will provide approximately 190 detained New Yorkers with legal representation, increasing their odds of prevailing by up to 1000%. According to The Center for Popular Democracy, over 7,000 New York City citizens lost a parent to deportation between 2005-2010 (1,167 per year), and placing these children in foster care costs $12.6 million a year. Comparatively, expanding NYIFUP to provide competent legal representation to all poor and detained New Yorkers costs $5.3 million annually – less than 1% of 1% of the City’s approximate $70 billion annual budget.

The LSNTAP / PBN webinar on October 23rd, covered many topics relating to the use of technology for pro bono engagement, and contained a great deal of practical advice for new projects to keep in mind, learned over the course of several distinct projects. The presenters for the webinar from Pro Bono Net were Mirenda Watkins, the LawHelp Interactive Coordinator, Adam Friedl, the Pro Bono Coordinator, and Liz Keith, the LawHelp Program Manager, as well as Carolyn Coffey, the Supervising Attorney at MFY Legal Services. Adam Friedl began the presentation with the often inaccurate maxim “If you build it they will come” and pointed out the risk of assuming that every exciting new tech project will be a success. While a sense of energy and excitement over an innovative tech project may be important to its success, Adam Friedl pointed out that careful planning, patience, and a number of other considerations must also be taken into account. Three goals of tech enabled pro bono were explained the first being helping pro bono programs by increasing volunteer engagement and education, the second being aiding pro bono lawyers with enhanced support tools and access to specialized expertise and creating new ways of volunteering, and the third being assisting clients by providing more resources more efficiently to underserved communities.

Mirenda Watkins gave the first presentation on Technology Tools with the Power to Enhance Pro Bono Initiatives. The major example described was LawHelp Interactive, which makes extensive use of interactive forms, primarily using HotDocs and A2J Author in an interview format. The interactive legal forms allow users to create legal documents that are both standardized and acceptable by courts, but also personalized to their particular case. LawHelp Interactive also aids pro bono volunteers by providing them with specialized information that may be outside of their area of expertise, and allows pro bono attorneys to more efficiently screen potential clients. The online availability of these forms also allows for remote sharing to overcome physical barriers, and allows reusable information (such as birth date) to be carried over rather than repeatedly reentered.

The next section of the presentation consisted of advice regarding how to build and sustain such a program, and getting volunteers to enthusiastically embrace the use of LawHelp Interactive forms and interviews. Perhaps the most important practice to remember for driving engagement for this, and other tech projects is creating partnerships. Working with court support staff to ensure that the forms are acceptable was of vital importance, and working with organizations such as libraries was extremely helpful for increasing awareness and accessibility with regard to LawHelp interactive resources. Mirenda highly recommended involving partner organizations early in the planning process, and staying willing to compromise to see the partnerships succeed. Over ambition was also stated as a potential detriment to many projects, and starting tech projects on a small scale with achievable results is a good start that can be built up later as needed. Ongoing training should also be maintained, in order to keep volunteers and attorneys up speed with the resources. Consistent evaluation is also vital, as it can definitively show the successes of the resources, as well as pointing out potential flaws or areas for improvement.

The section on the New York Family Court Remote Volunteer Attorney Program was presented by Adam Friedl. The program was designed to help expand the reach of the Family Court Volunteer Attorney Program to connect with dramatically underserved populations. While the Family Court Volunteer overall helps to answer questions and gives free unbundled legal advice to unrepresented litigants, the program had some difficulties. Certain areas were proving difficult for volunteer attorneys to reach, and Staten Island in particular was proving difficult due a lack of dedicated personnel, lack of physical space set aside for the program, and most of all by the area’s relative geographic inaccessibility. The remote program overcomes this by utilizing videoconferencing and remote IP printing so that attorneys in Manhattan can serve litigants in other locations without leaving the borough.

The project has been very successful in Staten Island and is now expanding to reach other counties in upstate New York. Several factors contributed to the success of the project, the most important being the policy of keeping things as simple as possible. Collaborating with the IT personnel in each county was also seen as vital, and getting the local court administrations and bar associations invested in the success of the project also helped a great deal. Adam Friedl did however bring up possible challenges that should be kept in mind, which included political disputes and regional divisions, and the need to adapt and utilize different staffing models to take into account differing circumstances county by county. Another large challenge is maintaining a high level of energy and enthusiasm for the project and keeping involvement a positive experience for the volunteers and litigants alike.

Carolyn Coffey then gave a talk showcasing the NYC Consumer Debt Defense Project. The consumer debt defense project was meant to help individuals being sued by debt buyers in New York City, 95% of whom reside in low or moderate income areas, and only 2% of whom are represented by counsel. A great number of these lawsuits are very sloppy and shaky cases against low income individuals, usually for less than $2,000. The Civil Legal Advice and Resource Office or CLARO provided weekly walk in clinics, held in courthouses to help litigants by providing legal advice and document preparation assistance, and was staffed by pro bono attorneys and law students. The enormous success and popularity of the program however, created problems as clinics began to overflow, and more complex documents such as MSJs began to bog down service speed even more. The solution to these challenges was to begin utilizing document assembly resources from LawHelp Interactive.

The use of document assembly resources by both advocates and pro se litigants has managed to vastly increase the speed at which CLARO can do its job. The standardized forms work to generate modifiable Word documents with contextual information applied to each case. Aggressive debt buyers with fake, sloppy, or missing documents can be countered by the Demand for Document and Debt Verification Letters that the interactive forms create. The success of this tech-enabled project hinges on the significant speed increase from the days of handwritten forms and notes. It helps to support less experienced volunteers in areas that may be beyond their area of expertise. While some there was some measure of reluctance by individuals who felt comfortable with the old methods, and challenges faced due to the need to train volunteers with the new software, CLARO has still benefited greatly from the new tech methods.

The final presentation of the webinar was on Mobile and Remote Innovations to Support Pro Bono Engagement, by Liz Keith. The first project illustrated was the Pro Bono To Go project being pioneered in Minnesota, where a mobile version of ProJusticeMN.org is being developed and will feature settlement checklists and client interview guides to support advocates. The mobile checklists are valuable for helping to get the most out of settlement opportunities, which can rise unexpectedly in court. The mobile version of the settlement checklist helps to identify pitfalls or problem areas that may be missed by inexperienced attorneys, or those working outside of their areas of expertise. The mobile interview guides provided by Pro Bono To Go can be used to streamline and improve sessions in walk in clinics with volunteer attorneys. Other mobile projects include Apps which connect attorneys to information about volunteering, and screening Apps to help non legal volunteers such as nurses and social workers identify potential clients.

Remote service models for pro bono were also featured, specifically programs such as LiveHelp, Virtual Legal Clinics, and Remote Document Reviews, which all have the benefit of overcoming geographic barriers that would previously have inhibited pro bono engagement. In addition to providing information find and referral assistance, LiveHelp volunteers provide a range of other services that vary from state to state. The types of LiveHelp volunteers also vary from state to state, ranging from to librarians, to law students and private attorney volunteers. Perhaps the largest issues that should be considered when using volunteers for LiveHelp is the fact that they require an investment in training and supervision on an ongoing basis in order to ensure quality. There are however, numerous benefits to using volunteers. A New York LiveHelp pilot program, which mainly utilized law student volunteers, found in a survey that LiveHelp volunteers felt they were more likely to volunteer for pro bono service later in their careers as a result of their experience with the program The flexible schedule that the remote nature of LiveHelp allows volunteers to adopt also provides them with a much greater opportunity to volunteer for busy individuals who may not have a large amount of time available. The LivePerson platform used by many states can also be useful for reporting and administration purposes, and achieved chatlogs and other services can help project managers with supervision and support.

The presenters Liz Keith, Mirenda Watkins, Carolyn Coffey, and Adam Friedl can be reached by email if anyone has additional inquires. A full recording of the webinar is also available for those who are interested. The next webinar in the series, Beyond Online Intake: Looking at Triage and Expert Systems, will be held on December 4th, 2013.

On October 29th the Association of Pro Bono Counsel (APBCo) hosted the inaugural Small Business Legal Academy (SBLA) at Harlem’s World Famous Apollo Theater. The purpose of the SBLA was to assist nascent small businesses by connecting them with pro bono and legal services attorneys and community development organizations. In the post below Alison King, Pro Bono Counsel at Kaye Scholer and one of the lead organizers of the SBLA, reflects on the impetus for the SBLA, the benefits of the model, and the successful day itself.

Small business legal relief is an integral aspect of law firm pro bono programs and economic redevelopment initiatives throughout New York City. The typical model involves one firm partnering with one legal services provider to identify a community-based organization (or citywide organization with local offices) to serve a specific under-resourced community in need of economic development. The legal services provider and local organization help with logistics such as outreach, client screening, data collection, and follow-up. A range of legal services are then provided by the firm at ongoing, regularly scheduled clinics. At their discretion, firms can provide follow-up pro bono representation of individual businesses. This has been and continues to be a successful, even crucial tool in community economic development.

Harlene, Alison, and Kevin
Alison King (Kaye Scholer), Harlene Katzman (Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP), and Kevin Curnin (Stroock & Stroock & Lavan) at Harlem’s World Famous Apollo Theater (Bisnow Media)

The Small Business Legal Academy (SBLA) is a step beyond the traditional model. Our reinvention of the small business pro bono legal services throws aside the single site model in favor of an open market approach: bringing law firms and fledgling small businesses together on a large scale, adding to the mix financial services consultants and City and State agencies. This model is designed to have deeper immediate impact, with a wider array of resources, and the opportunity to discuss typical legal issues with a broad audience (through workshops) as well as advise individual business owners (through one-to-one legal counseling). The model is replicable, and APBCo is beginning to plan SBLAs in Los Angeles and Dallas and future academies in New York.

We launched our pilot Small Business Legal Academy at Harlem’s World Famous Apollo Theater, on October 29, 2013. We are deeply appreciative to the Apollo for the opportunity, and particularly to Joe Levy, Director of Operations at the Apollo.

This project was conceived by New York-based members of the Association of Pro Bono Counsel (“APBCo”), a membership organization of full-time pro bono counsel and coordinators at major commercial law firms. APBCo has over 125 members from more than 85 law firms nationwide, including many AmLaw 200 firms. APBCo is dedicated to improving access to justice by advancing the model of the full-time law firm pro bono counsel, enhancing the professional development of pro bono counsel, and serving as a unified voice for the national law firm pro bono community.

The inspiration for a nationwide project grew out of a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, DC. Last September, the Vice President met with APBCo’s Board of Directors to focus on issues of access to justice and the role of pro bono attorneys in the delivery of legal services to the poor, including innovative collaborations between law firms, legal services organizations, bar associations, and the judiciary.

With this backdrop, APBCo initiated a long-term project to seed and launch a series of new collaborations across the country designed to expand national law firm efforts to increase access to justice. The APBCo IMPACT (Involving More Pro bono Attorneys in our Communities Together) Project is already taking root in eight urban centers, from Seattle to New York, and beyond. The objective is to design innovative and sustainable new solutions that will increase access to free legal services. The Small Business Legal Academy is one of several APBCo IMPACT projects in New York City and in other large cities across the country.

APBCo reached out to the following legal services organizations as partners for the SBLA:

Lawyers Alliance for New York

Legal Aid Society of New York

Legal Services NYC, Brooklyn A

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest

Probono.net

Start Small, Think Big

Urban Justice Center

Volunteers of Legal Service

City Bar Justice Center/NELP

The planning committee consisted of representatives from each of those organizations, and from the following law firms: Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, Kaye Scholer, Proskauer Rose, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Skadden Arps, and Stroock Stroock & Lavan.

The first SBLA was open all day, October 29th,assisting 215 business owners and micro-entrepreneurs; the academy included legal service sessions with 157 volunteer attorneys from 31 APBCo member law firms, workshops tailored to small business owners and non-profit leaders, and a small business bazaar with financial services consultants, City and State agencies, and other service providers. The overall goal was to provide immediate basic legal assistance to small businesses and to educate the small business community about the services, pro bono and otherwise, legal and non-legal, that are available to them to help grow their business.

As Bill Lienhard, Executive Director of Volunteers of Legal Services, eloquently said: “I am grateful that, through VOLS’ Microenterprise Project, I had the opportunity to be part of this important effort to provide legal information, advice, and assistance of the highest caliber to New York City’s small businesses and entrepreneurs. I look forward to continuing to work with the firms and organizations that, under APBCO’s leadership, made the SBLA such a success.” My thoughts exactly. Thank you to all of the people who helped us make this such a wonderful event. See you at the next SBLA!

To close out National Pro Bono Week, I had the opportunity to conduct a short video interview with Colin O’Keefe of LXBN. In the brief interview, I had the opportunity to discuss a couple of the series we’ve been running here on Connecting Justice Communities—both our guest posts this week and the Superstorm Sandy Series.